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Baptist Medical Center has been named one of the recipients of the 2015 Healthgrades Patient Safety Excellence Award and the Outstanding Patient Experience Award.

The hospital is one of fewer than 100 in the U.S. to receive both awards, landing it in the top 2 percent of all hospitals nationally for patient safety and experience.

Healthgrades, the Denver-based online resource for information about physicians and hospitals, evaluated patient experience by applying a scoring methodology to 10 measures in data derived from patient surveys.

The safety award is given to hospitals for their performance in the prevention of serious and potentially preventable complications during hospital stays. Baptist scored in the top 10 percent of U.S. hospitals in that category.

"Our patients are having superior experiences. This tells us that we are doing the right thing. For the past three years, the entire hospital has come together to implement plans strengthening our relationships with each other, our patients and their loved ones," Baptist vice president of patient care and chief nursing officer Bobbie Ware said. "Baptist defines quality in a variety of ways, including clinical quality of care and patient outcomes. However, patients might see quality as the cleanliness of the facility, convenient parking or how attentive caregivers are to them. All of these are important to our patients."

Patient safety was evaluated utilizing claims data from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, and the application of software and patient safety incidents as defined by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Healthgrades also released a related white paper that identifies key observations involving award recipients.

"In reviewing patient safety data, Healthgrades would not consider a hospital that had even one reported safety incident," Baptist vice president and chief of medical operations Mike Maples said. "When the analysis was finished, our untiring pursuit of excellence landed Baptist in an elite category of the top 10 percent of all hospitals evaluated for safeguarding patients from serious, potentially preventable complications during their hospital stays."

According to Healthgrades, an average of 133,896 patient safety events could have been avoided if all hospitals in the U.S. had performed similarly to those that performed better than expected on each of the 13 indicators.

"This is an extraordinary honor which is a direct result of the care our employees and physicians provide to our patients every day," Baptist CEO Chris Anderson said. "These types of awards are extremely hard to earn. Our team approach through collaboration and commitment to Baptist's core values of integrity, compassion, excellence, stewardship and innovation, made this national recognition possible."